This past week has been amazing! We launched our project last Friday, and within 7 days we reached our goal of $15,000. We've gotten many offers from folks looking to join the team to help work on Blade Symphony and several requests for interviews with the team. The first of these interviews is up on Nerd Age.

Even though we've reached our goal, we're still far from finished. Additional pledges will offset additional costs that our team had expected to pay out of our own pockets. With more money in the bank, we'll be able to do more with Blade Symphony and possibly even release sooner. As a reminder, the Kickstarter-exclusive badge, skin and sword will only be available through this Kickstarter project which ends August 28th. But most of all, we need you to spread the word about Blade Symphony -- a multiplayer game is only as good as the people playing it!

To our backers: Thank you, you guys are great! We had no idea that the response to Blade Symphony would be so supportive and overwhelming.

A few of you asked us if we use motion capture to do our animations. The answer is no, we can't afford something like that! Besides, a lot of the moves we want to implement are superhuman and it would take pretty much Spiderman in a mo-cap suit to pull them off.

Instead we use Maya and hand animate everything. Usually I try to do the move myself in real life, just trying to get the basic movement for the torso and arms correct. Care also has to be taken with placement of the blade edge. Designing the move also involves figuring out how far the character will move, and how big of a range the attack is going to be. This dramatically changes how good the move is in combat.

I've been doing these justin.tv streams of us working on this or that lately (usually happens late in the evening Pacific Standard time) and they get automatically recorded to my channel. Today I've been working on animating Phalanx's heavy stance which is a top to down slash followed by a sliding uppercut.

I want to introduce you to the magnificent Tom Stoffel who is composing the soundtrack for Blade Symphony.

Scoring Blade Symphony is an incredibly challenging task, and that's largely my fault. As a designer, I wanted to cram so many different influences into the game's theme. When you have a game where a knight is wearing eastern-style plated armor fighting against a masked supersoldier assassin, how does one find the right musical motifs to blend together, and still have it work?

I thought the task I gave to Tom was going to be impossible, and boy was I wrong. He knocked out these sounds like a champ.

The sample I'm going to play for you is an early demo that Tom made. In this piece he was trying to mix the ancient east-meets-west sounds of the Black Rose with an electronic synth sound. This type of hybridization of styles is the beating heart and soul of Blade Symphony. I hope you enjoy it!

At about 4:30pm today, roughly 20 hours after we launched our effort to receive funding, we made it to 50% of funding for our goal.

We've worked on these type of games very hard since 2007, and are very thankful to everyone who has helped in the past, the original Team Dystopia, past members of the team throughout the years, including the Ninja Workshop team, our PHANs and Supporters.. and now, all of you have plucked our heartstrings with such gracious and generous pledges.

Again, there is no way to thank you enough. As a small token, we want to show off the concepts we've been working on for Kickstarter-exclusive swords for pledgers. This is just one of our many concepts, none or all of them may be made.